


When the Sun Sets

by nb_richie (shipit)



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Death, M/M, Metaphors, Suicide, but i'm proud of it, this was just me writing pretentious prose tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:07:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13756947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipit/pseuds/nb_richie
Summary: When Richie dies, Eddie is there to escort him to the next life.





	When the Sun Sets

“If I’m going to die, it’s going to be on my own terms,” Richie says aloud, reading the note written in his familiar, jerky, all-caps handwriting. By the time anyone realizes he’s gone, or finds his car, it’ll be too late to save him. “Because fuck the world and everything in it.” He nods to himself. At the bottom, the ink on his signature is still wet. It smears when he runs his thumb over it. With a sense of finality, he sets the note down on the couch beside his cell phone and an old photograph of him and his friends as children. Mike, he thinks was the name, had taken it, and had offered him a copy before he left Derry. He can’t, however, point out which one Mike is, or name any of the others in the photo except himself. Those thick glasses and buck teeth are too familiar.

He takes his car keys out of his pocket as he leaves the house, locking the door on instinct. If someone were to rob him, it wouldn’t matter. He won’t ever be returning home. 

In the driveway, his shiny red sports car is waiting for him. The paint is glossy and clean, perfect from its wash and polish the night before. Richie has always had a flair for the dramatic. Since he’s going to kill himself, he might as well do it with a bang. A part of him wants to get as high as possible first so that he doesn’t have to feel, but there’s something tugging at his stomach that tells him it would be disrespectful. All that comes to mind is a head of sandy blonde curls when he tries to imagine why, just like pharmacies make him think of freckles and wide chocolate eyes. 

His car engine hums happily when he turns it on, oblivious to its fate. Soon, it will be at the bottom of the bay and he’ll be inside of it. Dead. Happy. Free. 

As he pulls out of his driveway and begins the drive, things begin to come back to him. Soft lips, slick with chapstick that smells like hospitals but he remembers that he didn’t mind. A head tucked beneath his chin. His hands on a tiny warm body that he was protecting. The last flash is of a corpse, accompanied by an unbearable pain. Richie blinks back tears. He doesn’t know who he’s remembering, just that thinking about them makes his heart twist. 

He thinks he should be more upset, more frantic at the prospect of death, but he’s not. It feels like a comfort, a final solution to a problem that he can’t even remember. His brain gives him a flash of teeth and the rank odor of rotting flesh and he nearly swerves off the road. 

It’s bits and pieces like that that’ve been coming back lately that make him all the more determined to just end it all. He exists to make other people laugh, nothing more, and lately his comedy has been falling flat. He has no friends, no family, nothing but a huge empty house and a pantry full of instant noodles and Jack Daniels. There isn’t a point in continuing to live at this point. All week, he’s been deciding how to do it. Hang himself? Slit his wrists? Overdose? Suicide by cop? They all feel contrived. He came upon the idea of the car because hopefully, this way they’ll never find him. No one will have to see a dead body, like his nightmares have been showing him. Children, strung up and floating and missing limbs and unmistakably dead. 

“You’re really off your rocker, kid,” Richie says to no one in the voice of the genie from Aladdin. “Completely nuts.”

He laughs. “I sure am, talking to myself,” he says in his normal voice.

The road is nearly desolate given the early hour. No one likes to be driving at six in the morning. That’s good, it means that no one will see what he’s going to do. The sun is rising behind him, filling his car with a golden light and tinting the sky a pretty shade of pale blue. It’s beautiful in a way that makes his eyes hurt a little. 

Richie reaches for the radio to turn it on. A single line of “Africa” by Toto plays before he shuts it back off with a resolute click. He doesn’t understand why his heart skipped a beat listening to the song. Slowly drawing in a deep breath, he realizes that he’s almost to the bridge. No one else is around, no one to see or call 911. That’s good. He wouldn’t forgive himself if anyone did, not that he’d be alive to feel guilty anyways. 

The part where he has to swerve to miss the bridge comes much quicker than he expects, but also far too slowly. He shuts his eyes when he does it. His car jostles on the off-road, only to smooth out when it flies through the air. It hits the water with a smack. Richie unbuckles his seatbelt so that it stops cutting into his chest and forces himself to relax as the car slowly fills with water. His remaining air, thick and humid, runs out slowly. It takes several long minutes for the water to hit the roof. Then, it’s a matter of seconds before Richie’s lungs begin to burn. Suddenly he’s struck with a thought that he’s not ready to die. 

He can’t open the door to get out. Black spots start to dance in his vision as he struggles. It’s not too late, it’s not too late, until it is when he chokes in breath that’s made of nothing but water. The entire time he’s dying, he’s scared and in pain and he regrets it. 

Black. 

 

Richie blinks awake on the grassy cliff he drove off of. He looks at his hands, his legs. He’s ten, maybe eleven years old again. When he reaches up to his face, he feels the thick glasses from before he got contacts, and running his tongue through his mouth, feels the buck front teeth that he hadn’t grown into yet. If he’s dead, and he has to live his life in this body, he’ll kill himself again. 

“No you won’t.”

He spins around to see a young, frail boy with freckles, brown eyes, and a horrific fanny pack. The boy who Richie thinks about when he goes to the pharmacy. The boy he left in the tunnels.

“Eddie,” he says, his brain supplying the name that feels familiar on his clumsy lips. “Eds, what are you doing here? Why are we so young?”

Eddie doesn’t answer, sitting beside Richie and leaning against him like that’s where he belongs. Their fingers interlock and a sense of peace overcomes him. “You’re dead, Richie. You drowned.”

“Why are you here?”

“To take you home when you’re ready.”

That doesn’t quite make sense, but Richie doesn’t ask him to explain. More memories of that one fateful summer as a kid and the two days as an adult come back to him, albeit in parts. He remembers the sewers, the leper, the fight where they thought that they killed It. He remembers the dinner, the hotel, the sewer again. He remembers Eddie as a grown man, lying on a pile of muck and missing an arm. Dying. Dying in Richie’s arms and saying something cut off. 

It doesn’t hurt his time, but the emptiness is somehow worse. Richie squeezes Eddie’s hand, and he squeezes back. They sit there together all day, watching the world move around them. People stroll on the cliff edge and take pictures, or laugh, or throw rocks off the edge. None of them take notice of the two boys sitting there and watching the waves lap at the base of the cliff.

Richie thinks he can see his car if he looks hard enough, but then it’s gone like a trick of the light. 

He loses track of time until the sun tips into his vision and it stands at the crest of the waves on the horizon. When he stands up, he feels lighter. Eddie gets to his feet as well, still holding Richie’s hand. His eyes are old and wise, empty of the innocence that they should have. They don’t belong to this child’s body. 

“Are you ready to go home?” Eddie asks. 

Looking back out at the sun, Richie notices that it’s dipping down further now, painting the sky and the ocean pink. He nods. His feet carry him forward, and he and Eddie step off the cliff together. 

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr @nb-richie


End file.
